Is the EU gearing up for a public procurement revolution?

The Commission’s proposal for a Public Procurement Act, published on 9 September 2026, signals a material change in EU-wide public purchasing.

The key priorities behind the proposed regulation are to drive simplification, flexibility and efficiency in public purchasing, which accounts for approximately 15% of Europe’s GDP. Previous directives have generally not achieved those goals, with the procurement market seeing declining competition, limited SME and cross-border participation, and fragmented procedural rules. It remains to be seen whether the new Act will have greater success on this front.

What is proposed now is wider than a purely procedural reform. While it consolidates rules and simplifies procedures, it also places a greater emphasis on strategic procurement, bringing a new geopolitical focus to the rules underpinning the EU’s public procurement market.

It is a key plank in the EU’s competitiveness agenda and complements the Industrial Accelerator Act and EU Innovation Act in this respect. Main chapters within the Act are dedicated to wider EU focus areas such as security and resilience, European preference and green public procurement.

Structural reform

The move to a regulation rather than a directive is novel, bearing in mind that the EU procurement rules have been housed in directives for over 50 years. The shift in legislative provision is aimed at ensuring a more harmonised application of the rules across Member States.

The consolidation of the public sector, utilities and concessions regimes within a single regulation is a practical and (generally) welcome proposal, reflecting the fact that the various regimes have become steadily more aligned over the years.

One casualty of this proposal, however, is the lack of additional flexibility for utility undertakings in determining the duration of framework agreements. In the proposed Public Procurement Act, all public buyers are limited to 3 years for a single supplier framework, and 5 years for a multi-supplier arrangement (removing the longer duration previously available to utility purchasers).

Radical simplification of procedures

The biggest change for public buyers is that negotiating with suppliers becomes normal. Under the 2014 directives it is the exception. The standard procedures run on sealed bids: a public body publishes what it wants, suppliers submit offers, and the contract goes to the highest scoring bid, with no discussion in between.

That rule exists to prevent favouritism, since a buyer who can talk to bidders can also potentially steer the outcome. Negotiation is currently permitted only in defined situations, generally for more complex needs, and the choice of procedure must be justified.

The proposal reverses this. Any public body would be entitled to negotiate improved tenders in any contract, without having to justify their choice of procedure. The proposed Act obliges buyers to run negotiations carefully, so as to avoid the risk of steering the outcome.

Another proposed change is worth noting. Currently, public buyers can assess suppliers’ capacity first and invite only the strongest cohort to bid. The proposal removes that step, so every supplier meeting the minimum requirements would enter the negotiation, and the field would narrow only through rounds of negotiation on the offer itself.

Price also carries less weight than before. The use of lowest price must now be justified, and contracts would generally be awarded on the best price-quality ratio, with quality criteria accounting for at least 30% of the assessment.

European preference measures

One of the more notable aspects of the Act is the introduction of "European preference" measures.

While EU procurement rules have traditionally been relatively agnostic to the origin of suppliers or product, the proposed Act would give public buyers greater scope to favour EU suppliers and "covered" suppliers, i.e. those from a jurisdiction which is party to a treaty with the EU covering public procurement.

Rather than mandating protectionism, it creates an enabling framework: it gives public buyers the option to favour EU and “covered” suppliers, and separately reserves to the Commission a power to make some of these preferences mandatory.

In practice, a buyer could choose to restrict participation by non-EU suppliers in a tender, reject non-EU tenders, require minimum levels of EU or covered content, apply evaluation preferences for covered suppliers at award stage and, in some cases, reject tenders where covered goods, services or works account for less than 50% of the total tender value. The proposal also introduces a framework for determining whether operators, goods, services or works are "covered", supported by a Commission-managed online tool.

The Commission would also have powers to restrict access for certain third-country operators, including where equivalent access is not provided to EU suppliers, where security of supply concerns arise, or where restrictions are considered necessary to protect essential EU interests.

Taken together, these measures would mark a significant change in the approach to third-country participation in EU procurement markets. However, a number of practical questions remain, including how origin requirements will be assessed in complex supply chains and how compliance with content thresholds will be verified in practice.

These measures may also prove a source of trade friction. Non-covered suppliers, Chinese suppliers in particular, look most exposed, and they may well characterise the measures as protectionist and respond in kind potentially through export controls.

Much will be ultimately settled not by the Act itself but by sector-specific legislation such as the Industrial Accelerator Act, Chips Act 2.0, Cloud and AI Development Act, which will set the detailed rules for their respective sectors.

Transparency, digitalisation and procurement data spaces

The proposal seeks to improve how procurement information is collected, shared and accessed across the EU through a more integrated digital framework.

Member States would have to establish National Public Procurement Data Spaces (NPPDS), feeding into an EU-level data space managed by the Commission. This is intended to support greater transparency and facilitate monitoring of procurement markets, SME participation, cross-border procurement and strategic procurement objectives.

The data to be included is very extensive, covering not only procurement documents, but also contract documents down to the level of individual payments. Documents must be transmitted to the NPPDS as soon as possible after creation, giving rise to a potentially onerous administrative burden.

Next steps

The proposed Act will follow the ordinary legislative procedure. The 2014 procurement Directives took approximately two years from proposal to adoption, and those Directives were building on an existing framework rather than recasting it entirely as a single Regulation.

Given the breadth and political ambition of this proposal, (involving the merger of three Directives, the introduction of Made in Europe interventions, new data obligations and sweeping procedural changes) the legislative process for the Act would take at least as long if not longer. It is currently envisaged that the Act would take effect two years from publication in the Official Journal.